Sheilah Kast

Host, On The Record

Sheilah Kast is the host of On The Record, Monday-Friday, 9:30-10:00 am. Originally, she hosted WYPR's Dupont-Columbia University award-winning Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast from 2006 - October 2015. She began her career at The Washington Star, where she covered the Maryland and Virginia legislatures, utilities, energy and taxes, as well as financial and banking regulation. She learned the craft of broadcasting at ABC News; as a Washington correspondent for fifteen years, she covered the White House, Congress, and the 1991 Moscow coup that signaled the end of the Soviet empire. Sheilah has been a substitute host on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and The Diane Rehm Show. She has launched and hosted two weekly interview shows on public TV, one about business and one about challenges facing older people.

Today, on the Checkup, we look at Accountable Care Organizations, or ACOs. Those are groups of independent providers in a particular community who join together to coordinate care—and to save money. ACOs can include hospitals, physicians, and specialists.

Sheilah Kast speaks with Republican Delegate Michael Smigiel of Cecil County, the sponsor of the repeal bill, and Margaret Bibbo, a parent and educator.

Maryland is one of 45 states that has adopted what’s called the Common Core standards for curriculum in public schools. The Maryland State Board of Education adopted them in June 2010, but this is the school year the standards are being implemented – and the movement against them by some parents and teachers is building steam.

Baltimore writer Dwight Watkins published a piece in the online magazine Salon this week about the isolating effects of poverty in the East Baltimore neighborhoods where he grew up. Sheilah Kast talks with him about how some in East Baltimore are "too poor for pop culture."

Many teenagers with HIV are not getting treatment for the disease until the virus is in advanced stages. That’s the finding of a study published this week in the journal Pediatrics. It was a retrospective study of 13 clinic sites around the country, including one in Baltimore. They looked at new patients ages 12 to 24. They looked at teenagers who were infected through behavior, not those who became positive at birth.

One-hundred ten years ago this Friday, Baltimore could be seen as a glow in the night sky for miles around the city. It wasn’t the city lights that generated the glow but a wind-stoked fire that ravaged much of the city’s downtown. The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 is considered the third worst fire to hit an American city and it shaped downtown in ways still visible today.

“Magic is what people call it when the universe corrects itself,” says one of the characters in Laurel Snyder’s new book. We met Laurel Snyder, who was born in Baltimore, about two years ago, when we talked about her book for kids, Bigger than a Bread Box. It’s a book about families with a dose of magic.